"Let me see it for a minute.” Let me see it: you saw a basketball or a pack of baseball cards or a plastic water gun by taking it into your hands, and what happened after that was in doubt. Ownership depended mostly on not letting anyone see anything. If you let a kid see a bottle of Yoo-hoo for a minute, he’d drink what was left of it.
“Let me see it, let me check it out. I only want to take it for a ride.”
Dylan Ebdus gripped the handlebars. His father had pried off the training wheels the day before, and Dylan still wobbled, still scuffed with his sneakers groping away from the pedals to steady and brake against the sidewalk. “Only if you stay on the block,” Dylan said, miserably.
“You afraid I’m gonna take it? I just want a ride. You get it back after that, you got it all day, man. Just let me go around the block.”
It was a trap or a puzzle, the way Robert Woolfolk already knew to work Dylan’s guilt. And the empty block conspired to leave Dylan alone to solve it. Robert Woolfolk was a kid who carried a vacuum around with him, or revealed by his presence the vacuum on Dean Street, the expanse of moments when no one saw and no one knew what happened in plain sight, when all of the block was shrouded in daylight.
Robert Woolfolk added his hands to the handlebars beside Dylan’s and tugged gently at the bike.
“Stay on the block.”
“Around once, that’s all.”
“No, I mean stay in front of the house.”
“What, you think I’m not coming back? Just around the block.”
What came out of Robert Woolfolk’s mouth was petition and chant, irresistible in its illogic. His eyes, meanwhile, were hard, a little bored.
“Just once around.”
Robert Woolfolk’s legs were too long to unfold in the span between seat and pedals, so he rode with his knees doubled and knobbing up near the handlebars, like a clown on a tricycle. Then he changed his approach, elevated his hips above the seat to stand on the pedals and pump side to side, elbows flaring. The bike teetered, annexed to Robert Woolfolk’s stretching limbs. Like that, a vanishing pile of elbows, he took the bike around the corner of Nevins.
How long did it take to go around the block?
How long was twice as long as that?
The tonguelike latch of Dylan’s black ironwork gate rattled with the vibration of a bus going by. Though there were no trees on the Nevins end of Dean Street, red fallen leaves had blown into the gutter from somewhere. The plastic milk cartons in front of the bodega claimed you could be fined or go to jail for not returning them to May Creek Farm, Incorporated, a fairly unlikely destination if you gave it any thought.
The afternoon withered like a balloon around Dylan on his stoop, waiting for Robert Woolfolk to return. The minutes accumulated, stacked up indifferently on the distant face of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock. Nevins Street might as well have been a canyon into which Robert Woolfolk had vanished like a cartoon coyote, wordlessly, trailing puffs of dust. It was pretty much as if there had never been a bike.
The last thing Dylan Ebdus’s mother, Rachel, had taught him, before she left Dylan’s father and vanished from their home, was the word “gentrification.” They were walking home to Dean Street from Flatbush Avenue, on a rare jaunt past the slummy blocks east of Nevins. Rachel was trying, perhaps, to make him understand Brooklyn, the world into which she was about to abandon him.
There were two worlds, anyway. In one, his father paced upstairs, creaked chairs, painted, while his mother, downstairs, played records, ran water over dishes, laughed on the telephone, her voice trailing up the curve of the long stair. His mother’s spaces—the parlor, full of her books and records, the kitchen, where she cooked and laughed and argued on the phone, her table littered with newspapers and cigarettes and wineglasses—were for Dylan full of unpredictability and unrest, like his mother herself. Dylan’s solitude, which his father left unbruised, his mother burst like a grape. She might clutch him and, with fingers kneading his skull through his hair, say, “You’re so beautiful, so beautiful, you’re such a beautiful boy,” or just as likely sit apart from him smoking a cigarette and say, “Where did you come from? Why are you here? Why am I here?” or “You know, precious child, that your father is insane.” She was wild with information he couldn’t yet use: Nixon was a criminal, the Dodgers moved to California, Chinese food gives you a headache, Muhammad Ali resisted the war and went to jail, Hitchcock’s British films were better than his American ones, circumcision was unnecessary but women preferred it. Dylan worked Rachel’s margins, dodging her main force to dip sidelong into what he could make sense of. He tiptoed close under the cover of Rachel’s monologue, thinking it was another phone call, to find someone seated at her table instead, drinking iced tea, sharing Rachel’s ashtray, laughing, listening, detecting Dylan’s footfalls, which Rachel had ignored. Then Rachel would stir from her chair, cigarette in her fingers, and usher Dylan to the front door, point out the children playing on the sidewalk, insist that he join them. Rachel had a program, a plan. She had grown up a Brooklyn street kid and so would Dylan. And so she’d eject him from the first of his two worlds, the house, into the second. The outside, the block. Dean Street. Brooklyn.
“Gentrification” was a Nixon word, uncool. “If someone asks you, say you live in Gowanus,” she said. “Don’t be ashamed. Boerum Hill is pretentious bullshit.” Rachel sprayed language as the hydrant opened by the Puerto Rican kids around the corner on Nevins on the hottest days that year sprayed water, unstoppered, gushing. “Never let me hear you say the word ‘nigger,’ ” she said, whispering it heavily, lusciously. “That’s the only word you can’t ever say, not even to yourself. In Brooklyn Heights they call them animals, they call the projects a zoo. Those uptight reactionaries deserve the break-ins. They ought to lose their quadraphonic stereos. We’re here to live. Gowanus Canal, Gowanus Houses, Gowanus people. The Creature from the Gowanus Lagoon!” She inflated her cheeks and curled her fingers and attacked him. Her raven hair haloed in sunlight, her fingertips stained with nicotine or marijuana.
Brooklyn was actually simple compared with his mother.
“A gang from the Gowanus Houses picked up a fifth grader after school and took him into the park and they had a knife and they were daring each other and they cut off his balls,” she told him. “He didn’t fight or scream or anything. It’s not too soon for you to know, my profound child, the world is nuttier than a fruitcake. Run if you can’t fight, run and scream ‘fire’ or ‘rape,’ be wilder than they are, wear flames in your hair, that’s my recommendation.”
Rachel wasn’t fully responsible for what she said, Dylan knew. She was afraid, too. Dylan’s role was to unravel what she said and ignore ninety per cent of it, to solve her.
“That beautiful black man who moved next door is Barrett Rude, Jr., he’s a singer, he was in the Distinctions, he’s got this amazing voice, he sounds just like Sam Cooke. I actually once saw them, opening for the Stones. His son is your age. He’s going to be your new best friend before the end of the summer, that’s my prediction.”
It was the last of Rachel’s setups. Her last chance to steer him into a Brooklyn future.
Dylan Ebdus, one-man integration unit.
"You like comics?” Mingus Rude said, the first day they met.
“Sure,” Dylan said, unsure.
Mingus Rude excavated four comic books from his closet floor, Daredevil #77, Ghost Rider #4, Doctor Strange #12, The Incredible Hulk #68. They’d been tenderly handled to death, corners rounded, paper browned by hot, attentive breath, pages chewed by eyes. “mingus rude” was written in slanted ballpoint capitals on each first interior page.
Mingus read certain panels aloud, incanting them, shaping Dylan’s attention, shaping his own. Dylan felt himself permeated by some ray of attention. He felt an uncanny warmth in the half of his chest that was turned toward Mingus.
“You know what they say now? Doctor Strange could take the Incredible Hulk by making some kind of mystical cage but he couldn’t take Thor because Thor’s a godlike figure, as long as he doesn’t lose his hammer. If he loses his hammer dude’s nothing better than a cripple.”
“Who’s Thor?”
“You’ll see. You know where to buy comics?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Ever steal comics?”
“No.”
“It’s no big thing. You go to camp this year?”
“No.” No year, Dylan almost said. He’d found an artifact on Mingus’s dresser, a sort of tuning fork.
“That’s a pick,” said Mingus.
“Oh.”
“Like a comb, for black hair. Want to see a gold record?”
Dylan nodded mutely, dropped the pick. Mingus Rude was a world, an exploding bomb of possibilities. Dylan was already jealous, wondering how long he’d be able to keep the new kid to himself.
They crept upstairs. Barrett Rude, Jr., had placed his bed opposite the heavily ornate marble mantelpiece, behind the shaded light of the tall windows, the showpiece windows meant for front parlors filled with pianos and upholstery, eighteenth-century Bibles on stands, who knew what else. Barrett Rude, Jr.,’s bed, which lay on the floor there under the scrolled Dutch ceiling, was a wide flat bag filled, as Mingus Rude demonstrated in passing with a neat two-palmed shove, with actual water, an undulating sea trapped in slick sheets. The two gold records were, oddly, just what their name promised, gold records, 45s, glued to white matting and framed in stained aluminum, not up on the bare walls but propped on the crowded mantel beside balled dollar bills and empty packs of Kools.
Mingus led Dylan to the back yard, where they winged rocks into the sky, let them plop into the Puerto Ricans’ yard. The air smelled like somebody’s arm up close. You could hear the steady ding of a Mister Softee truck on Bergen Street, probably with a string of the usual kids hanging on it.
“I guess you know my mother’s white,” Mingus said.
“Sure.”
“White women like black men, you heard that, right?”
“Uh, sure.”
“My father don’t talk to that lying bitch no more.” He followed this with a sharp laugh of self-surprise. “He paid a million dollars for me. That’s what he had to pay to get me back, a million cold. You can ask him if you think I’m lying.”
“I believe you.”
“I don’t care if you believe me, it’s true.”
Dylan looked at Mingus Rude’s lips and eyes, his exact brownness, took it in. Dylan wanted to read Mingus Rude like a language, wanted to know if the new kid had changed Dean Street or only changed Dylan himself by arriving here. Mingus Rude breathed through his mouth. The palms of his hands were as white as Dylan’s. He wore corduroys. Anything was possible, really.
A million-dollar kid doesn’t belong on Dean Street, Dylan wanted to say. The word “million,” even.
Mingus Rude was a scant four months older than Dylan Ebdus, but those months hit the calendar such that Mingus was a grade ahead. He’d start sixth grade this year, at the Intermediate School 293 Annex, in the turf of the Gowanus Houses: no man’s land. If Mingus were four months younger, then he and Dylan would have been heading to grade five at P.S. 38 together.
A grade of school was a bridge in mist. No way to picture where it touched land again, or who you’d be when it did.
You met zones everywhere. The schoolyard was neighborhoods: black, black girl, Puerto Rican, basketball, handball, left behind. Black girls had a language of partial words, chants harder to learn than anything in class. The place was a cage for growing, nothing else. You couldn’t be left back from fish sticks and sloppy joes.
There was a general noise at the edges you’d begun to detect, akin to indecipherable ballpoint desktop gougings. A scribbled voice. The first few times someone said, “Hey, white boy,” it sounded like a mistake. You had to be guided into the new relation by the girls, the boys were actually a little shy about it.
Older kids bunched at the school entrances and in corners of the yard. Robert Woolfolk was among them, the lurkers. Even standing in one place, Woolfolk moved like a sprained knee, like he was forever angling a too-small bike around the corner of Nevins.
Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude: one crossing the street to dodge a clump of kids from the projects, keeping his white face hidden in a jacket hood, the other hanging in loose gangs of black kids after school, then walking alone to Dean Street. The two of them, a fifth grader and a sixth, stranded in zones, in selves. White kid, black kid, Captain America and The Falcon, Luke Cage and Iron Fist. Returning from different schools to the same block, two brownstones, two fathers, Abraham Ebdus and Barrett Rude, Jr., each wrinkling back foil edges on TV dinners to discover peas and carrots that had invaded the mashed potatoes and Salisbury steak, setting them on the table in dour silence. Dinner in silence or to the sound of the television drowned by the baying of sirens, Nevins Street a fire lane, a path of destruction, the projects flaring up again, an apartment on the eighteenth floor with a smoldering mattress pushed halfway out the window, stuck. The grid of zones, the huddled brownstone streets between prison and projects, Wyckoff Gardens, Gowanus Houses. The whores on Nevins and Pacific. The high-school kids pouring out of Sarah J. Hale all afternoon, black girls already bigger than yo mama, Third Avenue another no man’s land, the empty lot where they raped that girl. The halfway house. It was all halfway, you walked out of your halfway school and tried to chart a course through your halfway neighborhood to make it back to your own halfway house, your half-empty house.
Afternoons after school, Dylan could hear the telephone ring from the kitchen while he sat out on his stoop, waiting, watching, afternoons sliding to twilight, as the traffic trickled down Nevins, mothers walked kindergartners home from the Y.W.C.A., buses drifted like humming loaves to the stoplight, waited, drifted on. It was a season of vanishing, of a silence like raw stupidity, like the unbearable ticking silence of a teacher expecting an answer from a kid everyone knew couldn’t even say his own name right.
Let his father answer the phone, if he could even hear it. Let him say she’s not here. Dylan’s father lacked Rachel’s street-readiness. His disapproval or his affection were usually aspects of a floating arrangement of father-notions, largely sonic: footsteps pacing overhead, a voice descending stairs.
One or two afternoons a week Mingus would lope down the block and raise his hand in greeting. He carried his notebook and textbooks loose under his arm, no bag, and he’d clatter them on the stoop carelessly, expressing something less than utter disdain and more than total mastery. They never discussed fifth or sixth grade, stuff too basic and mysterious to mention. Instead they read comics, shoulders hunched to protect the flimsy covers from the wind, puzzling out the last dram, the last square inch of information, the credits, the letters page, the copyright, the Sea Monkeys ads, the insult that made a man out of Mac. Then, just when Dylan had thought he was alone, Dean Street came back to life, Mingus Rude knowing everyone, saying yo to a million different kids coming out of Ramirez’s store with a Yoo-hoo or a Pixy Stix, to Alberto fetching Schlitz and Marlboros for his older brother. Mothers calling kids inside, the bus lit inside now, fat ladies coming home from offices at the Board of Education, on Livingston Street, their weary shapes like black teeth inside the glowing mouth of the bus, the light fading, street lights buzzing as they lit, their arched poles decorated with boomeranged-up sneakers, and Mingus Rude saying, one dying afternoon, eyes never ungluing from a panel in Marvel’s Greatest Comics in which Mr. Fantastic had balled himself into an orb the size of a baseball in order to be shot from a bazooka into the vulnerable mouth of an otherwise impervious fifty-foot-tall robot named Tomazooma, the Living Totem, “Your moms is still gone?”
“Yeah.”
“Dang, man. That’s fucked up.”
Then, sixth grade. Intermediate School 293. As before, Mingus had leapfrogged from the sixth-grade annex building where Dylan now was to the main building, a block away, where the seventh and eighth graders were housed. This was the year of the headlock, the year of the yoke, Dylan’s heat-flushed cheeks wedged into one or another black kid’s elbow, book bag skidding to the gutter, pockets rapidly, easily frisked for lunch money or a bus pass. On Hoyt Street, on Bergen, on Wyckoff if he was stupid enough to walk on Wyckoff. On Dean Street, even, one block from home, before the dead eyes of the brownstones. Adults, teachers, they were remote, blind, indifferent. Dylan, he was a bug on a grid of slate, white boy walking.
“Yoke him, man,” they’d say, exhorting. He was the object, the occasion, it was irrelevant what he overheard. “Yoke the white boy. Do it, nigger.”
He might be yoked low, bent over, hugged to someone’s hip then spun on release like a human top, legs buckling, crossing at the ankles. Or from behind, never sure by whom once the headlock popped loose and three or four guys stood around, witnesses with hard eyes, shaking their heads at the sheer dumb luck of being white. It was as routine as laughter. Yoking erupted spontaneously, a joke of fear, a piece of kidding.
He was dismissed from it as from an episode of light street theatre. “Nobody hurt you, man. It ain’t for real. You know we was just fooling with you, right?” They’d spring away, leave him tottering, hyperventilating, while they high-fived, more like amazed spectators than perpetrators. If Dylan choked or whined they were perplexed and slightly disappointed at the white boy’s hysteria. On those occasions, they’d pick up his books or hat and press them on him, tuck him back together. A ghost of fondness lived in a headlock’s shadow. Yoker and yokee had forged a funny compact. You regularly promised your enemies that what you did together had no name.
Dylan leaked saliva, tears. On a cold day a nostril-path of snot. Once, pee. He’d bite his tongue and taste the seepage, the tang of humiliation swallowed back. They made faces, rolled eyes. Dylan was hopeless, stained with shame. They’d try to overlook it.
“Boy bleeds you touch him, dang.”
“Nah, man, he all right. Let him alone, man.”
“You ain’t gonna say nothing, right? ’Cause you know we just messin’ around. We wouldn’t never do nothin’ to you, man.”
He’d nod, collect himself. Wait to be congratulated for gulping back a clog of tears, for exhibiting silence.
“See? You pretty cool, for a white boy. Get outta here now.”
White boy was his name. He’d grown into it, crossed a line, become visible. He shined like free money. The price of the name was whatever was in his pockets at the time, fifty cents or a dollar.
“White boy, lemme talk to you for a minute.” Head tipped sideways, too lazy to take hands from pockets to summon him. One black kid, two, three. Eyes rolled, laughing. The whole event a quotation of itself, a little boring.
If he ignored it, tried to keep walking: “Yo, white boy! I’m talking to you, man.”
“What’s the matter, you can’t hear?”
No. Yes.
“You don’t like me, man?”
Helpless.
The fact of it: he’d cross the street to have his pockets emptied.
“Just come here for a minute, man, I ain’t gonna hurt you. What you gotta be afraid for? Dang, man. You think I’m gonna hurt you?”
No. Yes.
The logic was insane, except as a polyrhythm of fear and reassurance, a seduction. “What you afraid of? You a racist, man?”
“Who you looking for? Ain’t nobody gonna help you, man.”
“Nah, man, chill out. This white boy’s all right, he’s cool. You don’t got to fuck with him.”
“Fuck he starin’ at me for, then? Yo, man, you a racist motherfucker? I might have to fuck up your stupid ass, just for that.”
“Nah, man, shut up, he’s cool. You cool, right, man? Hey, you got a dollar you could loan me?”
The distillation, the question at the core of the puzzle, asked a million times, a million ways:
“What you lookin’ at?”
“Fuck you lookin’ at, man?”
“Don’t look at me, white boy. I’ll slap you, motherfucker.”
Here was what Robert Woolfolk had prepared him for. The bicycle thief had awarded Dylan the gift of his own shame, his mummy’s silence, for use on a daily basis. Each encounter bore Robert’s signature tilted logic, interrogations spinning nowhere, ritual assurance that nothing had actually happened. And the guilt of Dylan’s whiteness excusing everything, covering it all.
What
the
fuck
am
I
looking
at?
If Dylan ever lifted his eyes from the pavement he might have been casting around for a grownup, or some older kid he knew to bail him out. Mingus Rude, say, not that he was clear he’d want Mingus to see him this way, cowering at the prospect of a yoke, white boy with cheeks hate-red. And he never allowed himself to say what he thought a hundred times: Hey, I’m not racist, my best friend is black! It wasn’t halfway sayable. Besides, nobody had ever said who was whose best friend. Mingus Rude likely had a million of them, seventh graders, black, white, who knew. And Dylan could have said black aloud about as easily as Fucking looking at motherfucking YOU, man!
One afternoon, near the finish of that sixth-grade spring, Mingus Rude was waiting for Dylan at the bottom of his stoop. Mingus wore a military-green jacket though it was too warm for a jacket, and the jacket clanked, full of some metallic something that had been pushed through torn pockets to nestle in the lining. The jacket’s back panel bore Mingus’s tag, Dose, elaborately surrounded by asterisk-like stars and swooping punctuation. Dylan pushed his schoolbag just inside Mingus’s basement door and they slouched their way together down Dean Street.
They crept wordlessly into Brooklyn Heights, away from Dean Street, putting the Gowanus Houses at their backs, skirting I.S. 293 entirely. They were invisible in the throngs on Montague Street, the three-o’clock flood of private-school kids from Packer Institute and Saint Ann’s and Brooklyn Friends. The Heights kids clustered around the Burger King and the Baskin-Robbins in giddy crowds, boys mixed with girls, all in corduroys and Lacoste shirts, flutes and clarinets in leather cases heaped carelessly with their backpacks at their feet, their senses so bound up in a private cosmos of flirtation that Dylan and Mingus passed through them like an X-ray.
Then a blond girl with an intricate mouthful of braces stepped out of her posse of look-alikes and called them over. Eyes wild with her own daring, she showed a cigarette.
“Got a light?”
Her friends busted up at the self-conscious comedy of it, but Mingus didn’t care. He dug in his jacket lining and pulled out a bright-blue lighter, like a Pez container that blurted a curl of fire. How she’d known he’d have it Dylan couldn’t fathom. The tone of the scene switched again, the girl leaned in, eyes narrowed ferally now, thrilled and wary, tilted her head, scooped her hair around her ear to protect it from the flame. She turned her back the moment the cigarette was lit and Dylan and Mingus moved on, dismissed.
The Heights Promenade was a rim of park cantilevered over the shipyards, Brooklyn’s sulky lip. Old men and women pecked forward like pigeons on cobblestone, or sat frozen with clutched newspapers on benches in the face of Manhattan’s tedious spires, the skyline a channel no one watched that played anyway, like famous static. Dylan and Mingus were detectives, following clues. The trail was legible in gushy, streaked fonts on lamppost bases and mail-deposit boxes, fire-alarm poles, garage doors, finger-traced in dust on the panels of trucks.
“Roto I,” “Bel I,” “Deal,” “Buster NSA,” “SuperStrut,” “FMD.”
“Non Stop Action,” translated Mingus. He was hushed by the knowledge, his eyes unfocussed. Tags and their invisible authors were the next Marvel superheroes, the hidden lore. “Flow Master Dancers.”
Roto and Bel and Deal were in DMD Crew, a new outfit from Atlantic Terminals, a housing project across Flatbush. SuperStrut was old school. The style might look funny now, but you wouldn’t disrespect it. The syllable “TOY” was written in mockery over certain tags, disrespect for a writer who was a toy.
Mingus fished in his lining for his El Marko, a Magic Marker consisting of a puglike glass bottle stoppered with a fat wick of felt. Purple ink sloshed inside the tiny screw-top bottle, staining the glass in curtains of color. Mingus drew out a safety pin and stuck the felt in a dozen places, until the ink bled so freely it stained the green cuff of his oversized jacket.
“Dose” went up on a lamppost, Mingus’s hand moving in studied arcs.
A tag was a reply, a call to those who heard, like a dog’s bark understood across fences. A reply in moist purple. The letters dripped and stunk thrillingly. Every time they went up, Mingus hustled Dylan away, the El Marko clanking back in his jacket lining against the blue lighter and whatever else. Their path was a zigzag sentence consisting of a single word, “Dose,” written in blank spots found everywhere.
Under oblivious eyes, the invisible autographed the world.
The long path of the Promenade curled at the end in a small abandoned playground, two swings, a slide. Mingus took a minute to tag “Dose” on the heel-dented mercury sheen of the slide, a particularly juicy rendition with a dripping halo.
He offered Dylan the El Marko. The purple-fingerprinted bottle rolled like something ripe in Mingus’s stained palm, a plum.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Tag up. Hurry.”
“How do I know what to write?”
“Don’t you got a tag yet? Make one up.”
Marvel Comics had it right, the world was all secret names, you only needed to uncover your own.
White Boy?
“Dillinger,” Dylan said. He stared, not quite reaching for the El Marko.
“Too long, man. Something like Dill 3, D-Lone.”
A Filipino babysitter creaked a stroller into the playground. Mingus slipped the marker into his jacket, tilted his head.
“Let’s go.”
You could flee a woman who was four feet tall with a baby lashed into a stroller, scramble away giddy and hysterical. It was only real threat that froze you where you stood, your feet like bricks, to dig in your pocket and offer up your bills and change.
Mingus hoisted onto the fence surrounding the playground, swung a leg, dropped. Dylan, trying to follow, doubled himself on the fence. Mingus braced under Dylan’s arms while Dylan scrabbled with his foot. They fell together like cartoon cats in a sack on the other side.
“Dang, son, get off me!”
Dylan found his glasses where they’d tumbled in the grass. Mingus brushed at his pants, his jacket, like James Brown checking his suit for imaginary lint. He was grinning, lit up. A shard of leaf in the coils of his hair.
“Get up, son, you’re on the ground!” Mingus at his happiest called Dylan “son” in a booming voice, another quotation, half Redd Foxx, half Foghorn Leghorn.
He offered his hand, yanked Dylan to his feet. Dylan wanted to clear the leaf from Mingus’s hair but left it alone.
They trudged down a grade to a hidden patch of land, a tilted triangle of desolate ailanthus and weeds, choked in exhaust at the edge of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, cars whirring indifferent below. The patch was littered with cigarette butts, forty-ounce bottles, shreds of tire—an oasis of neglect. Mingus leaned against the wall, and thumbed the blue lighter, held it sideways to the tip of a small, faucetlike chrome pipe, another surprise product of the green jacket’s lining. Head tilted, eyes squeezed in concentration, Mingus sipped at smoke, held it in with thin-pressed lips. Fumes leaked from his nose. He nodded his chin at Dylan, finally exhaled.
“You want some weed?”
“Nah.” Dylan tried to keep it breezy, an incidental turndown that could have gone either way.
Below, trucks roared past, bearing their own graffiti markings from other parts of the city, alien communication spread by an indifferent carrier, like a virus.
“I took it from my pops. He keeps it in the freezer.”
“Does he know?” Dylan asked.
Mingus shook his head. “He got so much, he won’t even notice.” He flicked the lighter again, the bowl of the pipe flaring orange, crackling faintly. Dylan worked not to tip his fascination.
“You ever smoke weed?”
“Sure,” Dylan lied.
“It’s no big thing.”
“It’s O.K., I did it before, I just don’t want to right now.”
“Before?”
“Sure,” Dylan said. “My mom’s a pothead.” As it came from his mouth Dylan felt he’d betrayed Rachel, played her like a card he didn’t mind losing.
“Yeah, well, speaking of which, my moms kicked my father out for smoking drugs,” Mingus said. Having chipped in his own disaster, he went mute. Possibly mentioning anyone’s moms out loud, even your own, was miscalculation enough to blow an afternoon.
You were never ineligible for a screwup like that—say the unsayable word and watch it foul the sky. Then you were right back where you didn’t want to be. Pinned to the grid.
A white boy with no moms, squirming in the glare.
Yoked.
Yo mama.
Mingus made the pipe disappear into his jacket. The two of them clambered back up the grade, scaled the fence easily, and in silence walked home, putting the Promenade behind them. Though Dylan was ready now to be offered the El Marko, ready to uncap the pinned-out, purple-soaked felt and feel it flow under his own hand, to discover his own graffiti name and to plop it dripping on the sides of lampposts beside Mingus’s “Dose,” they tagged nothing. Mingus’s hands remained buried in the pockets of the jacket, fists pushed into the lining to grip the lighter and the pipe and the El Marko so they didn’t clank together as they bounced against his thighs. Leaf still in his hair.
The first day of seventh grade Dylan stood on the slate in front of Mingus Rude’s stoop, waiting. If Mingus would walk with him up Dean Street to Court, walk through the doors of the school with him, side by side, everything might be different.
Women trudged little kids to kindergarten at the Y or moved alone up Nevins to the subway. A bunch of black girls swept up from the projects to high school. They shared a cigarette for breakfast, rumbled around the corner in a ball of smoke and laughter. It was the first day of school everywhere in the world, possibly.
Only one thing wrong with this picture, as the block cleared, the bus breathed past, a dog barked in a cycle like code: Dylan standing in long pants and with his backpack full of unruined binder pages and dumb pencils. He felt like an apple skinned for inspection, already souring in the sun. Those dogs could tell and probably anybody else, too: he stank of panic.
Dylan should have planned it with Mingus in advance, he saw now.
Up the stoop, he rang the bell.
He rang it again, shifting in his Keds, anxious, time ticking away, the day and the prospect of seventh grade rapidly spoiling with him in the sun.
Then, like an irrational puppet, panicked, he leaned on the doorbell and let it ring in a continuous trill. He was still ringing it when the door opened.
It wasn’t Mingus but Barrett Rude, Jr., in a white bathrobe, naked underneath, unhidden to the street, arms braced in the door, looking down. Face clotted with sleep, he blinked in the slanted, scouring light. He lifted his arm to cover his eyes with shade, looking like he wanted to wave the day off as a bad idea, a passing mistake.
“Hell you doing, Little Dylan?”
Dylan took a step backward from the door.
“Don’t never be ringing my doorbell seven in the morning, man.”
“Mingus—”
“You’ll see Mingus at the got-damn school.” Barrett Rude was waking into his anger, his voice like a cloud of hammers. “Get out of here now.”
It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. The song, that song, was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere.
At the very least the song was the soundtrack to your destruction, the theme. Your days reduced to a montage cut to its cowbell beat, inexorable doubled bass line and raunch vocal, a sort of chanted sneer, surrounded by groans of pleasure. The stutter and blurt of what—a tuba? French horn? Rhythm guitar and trumpet, pitched to mockery. The singer might as well have held a gun to your head. How could it have been allowed to happen, how could it have been allowed on the radio? That song ought to be illegal. It wasn’t racist—you’ll never sort that one out, don’t even start—so much as anti-you.
Yes they were dancing, and singing / and movin’ to the groovin’ / and just when it hit me / somebody turned around and shouted—
Every time your sneakers met the street, the end of that summer, somebody was hurling it at your head, that song.
September 4, 1976, the week Dylan Ebdus began seventh grade in the main building on Court Street and Butler, Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” was the top song on the rhythm-and-blues charts. Fourteen days later it topped Billboard’s pop charts. Your misery’s anthem, No. 1 song in the nation.
Sing it through gritted teeth: WHITE BOY!
Lay down the boogie and play that funky music till you die.
Seventh grade was where it turned out that when Dylan Ebdus finally joined Mingus Rude in the main building Mingus Rude was never there. It was as if Mingus walked another Dean Street to school, had actually all this time gone to another I.S. 293 entirely. The only evidence he existed was the proliferation of Dose tags on lampposts and mailboxes, Mingus’s handiwork spread in a nimbus with the school building at the center. Every few days, it seemed, produced a fresh supply. Dylan would covertly push a forefinger against the metal, wondering if he could measure in the tackiness of the ink the tag’s vintage. If his finger stuck slightly Dylan imagined he’d followed Mingus by minutes to the spot, barely missed catching him in the act.
Seventh grade was sixth grade desublimated, uncorked. It was the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to sixth grade’s “The Hobbit,” the real story at last, all the ominous foreshadowed stuff flushed from the margins and into view. It wasn’t for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.
Bodies ranged like ugly cartoons, as though someone without talent were scribbling in flesh.
Chinese kids had apparently gotten some warning well in advance, and had thoroughly disappeared. Puerto Rican or Dominican kids seemed to be tiptoeing away from the scene of everything. They decorated themselves differently and spoke more Spanish each passing hour. The scariest fights were between black girls.
There were just four other white kids in the school, three of them girls, with their own girl factors to work out. When Dylan Ebdus first spotted the fourth, Arthur Lomb, it was at a distance, across the schoolyard. It was like noticing the flight and fall of a bird across an expanse of leaf-blurred sky. It occurred at that moment after the bell had rung and the gym teachers who patrolled the yard had returned inside, ahead of the flood of students, and the yard became a lawless zone—that terrible sudden reframing of space which could happen anywhere, even inside the corridors of the school. Nevertheless it was a clumsy mistake for the boy now cringing on the ground to have been caught on the side of the yard so far from the entrance, a mistake Dylan felt he couldn’t forgive. He wouldn’t have forgiven it in himself.
Arthur Lomb fell to his knees and clutched his chest and keened. His words were briefly audible across the depopulating yard, each syllable riding a sharp insuck of air, “I!” Pause. “Can’t!” Pause. “Breathe!”
Arthur Lomb was pretending asthma or some other weakness. It was an identifiable method: preëmptive suffering. Nobody could do much with a kid who was already crying. He had no spirit to crush and it was faintly disgusting, in poor taste. He might even be truly sick, fucked up, in pain, who knew? Your only option was to say, “Dang, white boy, what’s your problem? I didn’t even touch you.” And move on.
Dylan admired the strategy, feeling at once a cool quiver of recognition and a hot bolt of shame. He felt that he was seeing his double, his stand-in. It was at least true that any punishment Arthur Lomb endured was likely otherwise to be Dylan’s, or anyway that a gang of black kids couldn’t knock Dylan to the pavement or put him in a yoke at the exact moment they were busy doing it to Arthur Lomb.
From that point on Arthur Lomb’s reddish hair and hunched shoulders were easy to spot. He dressed in conspicuous striped polo shirts and wore soft brown shoes, and carried an enormous bright-blue backpack, an additional blight. All his schoolbooks must be inside, or maybe a couple of stone tablets. The bag glowed as a target, begged to be jerked downward, to crumple Arthur Lomb to the corridor floor to enact his shortness-of-breath routine. Dylan had seen it done five times already before he and Arthur Lomb ever spoke. Dylan had even heard kids chanting the song at Arthur Lomb as they slapped at his reddened neck or the top of his head while he squirmed on the floor. Play that fucking music, white boy! Stretching the last two words to a groaning, derisive, Bugs Bunnyesque whyyyyyyyboy!
It was in the library that they finally spoke. Dylan and Arthur Lomb’s two homerooms had been deposited there together for a period, the school librarian covering some unexplained absence of teachers. Below a poster advertising “A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich,” a book the library didn’t actually offer, Dylan placed himself against a wall and flipped open issue No. 2 of the Marvel Comics adaptation of “Logan’s Run.” As the period ticked away glacially, Arthur Lomb buzzed him twice, squinting to see the title of the comic, then pursing his lips in false concentration as he mimed browsing the half-empty shelves nearby, before stepping close enough for Dylan to hear him speak in an angry, clenched whisper.
“That guy George Perez can’t draw Farrah Fawcett to save his life.”
It was a startling allusion to several bodies of knowledge simultaneously. Dylan could only glare, his curiosity mingled with the certainty that he and Arthur Lomb were more objectionable, more unpardonable, together than apart. Up close, Arthur Lomb had a blinky agitated quality to his features which made Dylan want to knock him down himself. His face seemed to reach for something, his features like a grasping hand. Dylan wondered if there might be a pair of glasses tucked in the background somewhere, perhaps in a side pocket of the monumental blue backpack.
“Seen it?”
“What?”
“ ‘Logan’s Run.’ ”
Fuck you looking at? Dylan wanted to shriek at Arthur Lomb, before it was too late, before he succumbed to his loneliness and allowed himself to meet Arthur, the other white boy.
“Not yet,” Dylan said instead.
“Farrah Fawcett is a fox.”
Dylan didn’t answer.
“Don’t feel bad. I bought ten copies of Logan’s Run #1.” Arthur Lomb spoke in a hurried whisper, showing some awareness of his surroundings, but compelled to spill what he had, to force Dylan to know him. “You have to buy No. 1s, it’s an investment. I’ve got ten of Eternals, ten of 2001, ten of Omega, ten of Kobra. And all those comics stink. No. 1’s a No. 1, doesn’t matter. You know Fantastic Four #1 goes for four hundred dollars? Kobra might be an all-time record for the stupidest character ever. Doesn’t matter. Put it in plastic and put it on the shelf, that’s what I say. You use plastic, don’t you?”
“Of course,” Dylan said resentfully.
He understood every word Arthur Lomb said. Worse, he felt his sensibility colonized by Arthur’s, his future interests coöpted.
The writing was on the wall. If Mingus didn’t resurface, Dylan and Arthur were doomed to friendship.
Aday later, Mingus did resurface. At three o’clock, the hour when the doors were thrown open and the school exploded onto the October-bright pavement, when Court Street shopkeepers stood arms-crossed in doorways, their jaws chewing gum or nothing at all, just chewing under narrowed eyes. Dylan tried to be lost in the flow of anonymous faces as he left the building, hoping to be carried a distance down Court Street disguised in a clot of anybodies before exposing himself as a solitary white boy. Today he stopped. Mingus sat cross-legged on the hump of a mailbox on the corner of Court and Butler, regarding the manic outflow of kids with a Buddha’s calm, as though from an even greater height than the mailbox, another planet maybe. Dylan understood at once that not only hadn’t Mingus been inside the school today, he hadn’t crossed its doors since summer, since the start of his eighth-grade year.
“Yo, Dill-Man!” said Mingus, laughing. “I was looking for you, man. Where you been?”
Mingus unfolded his legs and slid off the mailbox, pulled Dylan sideways out of the crowd, like there was never a question they left school together, like they’d done it every day for three weeks. They crossed into Cobble Hill, Dylan hitching his backpack high on his shoulders and trotting to keep up. “I haven’t seen you—” Dylan began.
“ ‘Whenever you call me, I’ll be there,’ ” Mingus sang, “ ‘Whenever you need me, I’ll be there—I been a-round!’ Here.” He crumpled a couple of dollars into Dylan’s hands and nodded at the Arab newsstand on the corner of Clinton. “Get me a pack of Kools, Super-D.” He tipped his head again. “I’ll be over here.”
“I can’t buy cigarettes.”
“Say it’s for your mom, he’ll sell it to you, don’t worry. Better let me hold your backpack.”
Dylan tried not to turn his head at the rack of comics as he stepped into the narrow, darkened space of the newsstand.
“Uh, pack of Kools. It’s for my mother.”
The operation unfolded precisely as scripted. The guy raised an eyebrow at the word “mother,” then slid the Kools across the linoleum counter with nothing besides a grunt.
Mingus stashed both cigarettes and change in his jacket-of-mystery, then led Dylan back toward the small park on Amity Street.
“Dill-Man, D-Lone, Dillinger,” Mingus chanted. “Diggity Dog, Deputy Dog, Dillimatic.”
“I haven’t seen you anywhere,” Dylan said, unable to check the plaint in his voice.
“You all right, man?” Mingus asked. “Everything cool with you?”
Dylan knew precisely what everything Mingus meant—all of seventh grade, whatever went on or didn’t inside the building that was apparently no longer Mingus’s problem.
“Everything cool?” Mingus demanded.
Mingus Rude was unreachable, blurred, maybe high, Dylan saw now. There wasn’t going to be any communing with his core, that vivid happy sadness which called out to Dylan’s own.
Dylan shrugged, said, “Sure.”
“That’s all I want to know, man. You know you’re my main man, Dillinger. D-Train.”
As they slipped into the park, Mingus exaggerated his ordinary lope, raised a hand in dreamy salute. Arrayed at the concrete chessboard tables were three black teen-agers in assorted slung poses. One more chaotically slung than the others, a signature geometry of limbs that caused Dylan’s heart to madly lurch. Nevertheless he strolled beside Mingus into the thick of it, accepted whatever was meant to unfold in the park from within his own sleepwalker’s daze, which, perfected at the new school, covered even the appearance here of Robert Woolfolk, Bike Stealer. Yoker Prime.
“Yo,” said Mingus Rude, lazily slapping at hands, humming swallowed syllables that might be names.
“What’s goin’ on, Gus?” said Woolfolk. When he saw Dylan he flinched with his whole face, his sour-lemon features hiding nothing, yet didn’t alter the arrangement of his limbs an inch.
The park was full of little white kids with bowl haircuts, maybe second or third graders from Packer or Saint Ann’s. They ran and screamed past the chessboard tables, dressed in Garanimals, arms loaded with plastic toys, G.I. Joes, water pistols, Wiffle balls. They might as well have been animated Disney bluebirds, twittering harmlessly around the head of the Wicked Witch as she coated an apple with poison.
“Shit,” Robert Woolfolk said, and now he smiled. “You know this dude, G?”
“This my man D-Lone,” Mingus said. “He’s cool. We go back, he’s my boy from around the block.”
Robert looked at Dylan a long while before he spoke.
“I know your boy,” he said. “I seen him from before you were even around, G.” He flicked his eyes at Dylan. “What up, Dylan man? Don’t say you don’t remember me, because I know you do.”
“Sure,” Dylan said.
“Oh, yeah?” Mingus said, carefully blasé. “So you down, right? You cool with my man Dylan.”
Robert Woolfolk laughed. “What you need me to say, man? You can hang with your white boy, don’t mean shit to me.”
At that, the moment was shattered in hilarity. The two other black teen-agers snorted, slapped each other five for the words “white boy,” as ever a transport to hear said aloud. “Ho, snap,” one said, shaking his head in wonderment as if he’d just seen a good stunt in a movie, a car flipped over or a body crumpled in a hail of blood-spurting bullet thwips.
Dylan stood frozen in his stupid backpack and unpersuasive Keds in the innocent afternoon, his arms numb, blinking his eyes at Mingus.
“We going down to bomb some trains or we sit here all day talking ’bout this and that?” Woolfolk said.
“Let’s go,” Mingus said softly.
“You bringing your homeboy here?”
Suddenly a woman stepped into the thick of them. Out of nowhere she made herself present. It was as though she’d ruptured a force field Dylan hadn’t thought was permeable, one where their talk, no matter how many times the word “fuck” was included, was sealed in a glaze of distant car horns and bird tweets and the younger kids’ sweet yells.
The woman was a mom, surely, one of the running kids had to be hers. She was maybe twenty-five or thirty, with blond hair, matching bluejean jacket and bell-bottoms, and granny glasses. Dylan could imagine her at one of his mother’s parties, waving a joint around, making some passionate digression about Altman or Szechuan, aggravating men accustomed to holding the floor. There were probably hundreds like her, false Rachels.
“You O.K., kid?”
She spoke to Dylan alone, there was no mistaking. The rest of them, Mingus included, were one thing in her eyes, Dylan another. Of all times, it would have to be now. Dylan had wished what felt like a million times for an adult to step up, for a teacher or a friend of his father’s to turn a corner on Dean Street and collide with one of his unnameable disasters, to break it open with a simple question like “You O.K., kid?” But not now. This woman sealed his status as white boy forever, precisely when Mingus had been working to change it.
“Hey, kid? Something wrong?”
Dylan had turned to her, helpless, gaping. There was no way to tell her how right and wrong she was at once, no way to make her evaporate. All the worse that she was beautiful, gleaming like the cover of one of Rachel’s Ms. magazines, which were still stacked up in the living room for Dylan’s eventual guilty perusal of illustrated features on bralessness. She shouldn’t have popped out of the other world, the Cobble Hill world of private-school kids, it was a misunderstanding.
“They’re my friends,” Dylan said feebly. As it was out of his mouth it occurred to him he’d failed another test, another where the correct answer was “Fuck you lookin’ at?” That phrase, robustly applied, might have actually transported them all back in time to a moment before Robert Woolfolk had said the words “white boy.” Dylan might have then been invited to trail the others to a transit yard or wherever else they were going in order to bomb some trains, a richly terrifying prospect. Dylan longed to bomb some trains as fiercely as if he’d been hearing that phrase for years instead of just once, moments ago.
No one else piped up to say, “Lady, mind your own fuckin’ business,” and Dylan saw that Robert Woolfolk and his two companions, Robert’s laugh track, were missing. Gone. Dylan had slipped a gear in staring perplexedly at the blond woman, lost a moment in dreaming, and in that moment Robert Woolfolk had shunted away, out of the blithe park that seemed intended to contain anything but him. As though making a silent confession of whatever it was the woman suspected was going on. Only Mingus remained, and he stood apart from the table where the others had sat, and from Dylan.
“Do you want me to walk you home?” the woman asked. “Where do you live?”
“Yo, Dylan man, I’ll check you later,” Mingus said. He wasn’t fearful, only uninterested in contending with the blond woman and anything she thought she knew. “Be cool,” Mingus said. He held out his hand, waiting for Dylan to tap it with his fingertips. “I’ll check you on the block, D.”
With that, Mingus hunched his arms around his jacket pockets as though leaning into a strong wind and ambled into the sun-blobbed trees in the far corner of the park, toward the B.Q.E., the shipyards, wherever he was going where Dylan wasn’t going to be swept along now.
That’s my best friend, Dylan wanted to tell the blond woman, who the longer he didn’t reply to her offer was more and more squinting at Dylan like she might have miscalculated, like he might be a thing spoiled by the company she’d found him in, a misfit, not a kid worth her rescue in the first place.
And that’s what he wanted to be to her: spoiled, stained with blackness.
Racist bitch.
Where do I live? In his fantasy Dylan replied, I live in the housing projects on Wyckoff Street, that’s where. The Gowanus Houses. You know the ones, they’re always on fire. If you want to walk me home, lady, let’s go. ♦
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